Online travel agencies are often at a crossroads as far as marketing - they can either spend truckloads of cash on search advertising (see Priceline) or they can supplement their ad budgets with more creative partnerships that engage the imaginations of their consumers.
Expedia Media Solutions, the travel marketing arm of Expedia, has been exploring the second half of this equation, working with travel partners on creating content-driven promotions that inspire their customers to visit new places.
First, there was Friend Trips, the $1 million travel giveaway on Facebook that encouraged users to bring at least 5 friends along for the ride. And bring they did - Expedia started at just over 100,000 fans and saw a giant leap thereafter. Today, they have over 1.7 million - clearly a continuing success story.
Noah Tratt, the Global VP of Expedia Media Solutions, spoke with Tnooz about the underlying strategy driving these continued new media efforts.
Expedia make a big effort to build a fan base through social media - Friend Trips is the most highly visible effort to that. One of the things we have learned as our fan bases interactions have matured, is that there is a great opportunity to partner with our friends in the travel industry to drive better engagement and better business results.
Following the uplift seen from the successful Friend Trips, the company came up with a destination-specific promotion targeted specifically at the undecided leisure traveller who may be looking for their travel adventure.
Dubbed South America Week, the campaign brought together a group of partners for a week-long celebration of South America during the typically cold early February period in North America.
The company focused on one partner each day, and delivered a sluice of content related to this partner on a custom landing page that was widely promoted across the Expedia properties. Each partner had different specifications, which led to a different selection of promotions each day of the week.
Results were significant, showing all kinds of uplift for the various brands involved:
- Avianca saw an increase of nearly 25k fans on Facebook
- The rich imagery was especially popular: Chile Tourism's images were viewed over 4,000 times, LAN Airlines saw 6,500 views, and Avianca's images from Colombia and Ecuador were viewed over 6,700 times.
- Engagement on Facebook exceeded the company's benchmark, performing at 4.89% above the standard 3.45%
And in regards to travel booked - really the most important measure of a campaign's business vitality - both Expedia and its partners made money:
- Rooms booked at *all* South American destinations increased 62% YOY during the campaign week.
- Per-country year-over-year number of rooms booked was also impressive:
- Ecuador: 158%
- Peru : 145%
- Columbia: 87%
- Brazil: 84%
One of the more successful components of the promotion was a direct integration with Expedia's weekly #ExpediaChat on Twitter. The Chat is one of Expedia's regular
events, where a moderated chat surrounding a particular theme happens each Wednesday on Twitter.
The South America Week chat was sponsored by Peru on the same day that they were the daily sponsor. It brought total engagement and interaction to customers - and also gave the powers-that-be a very clear opportunity to do some real-time market research regarding the traveler's mindset regarding South America.
The results for the chat were not at all shabby, especially given the relatively small time investment to organize and manage the chat.
- 15,000,000 impressions
- 445,000 reach
- 331 participants
- 2,000 tweets
After listing the stats, Expedia Media Solution's Global VP did not hesitate when asked if there were more such partnerships in the works.
These partnership approaches really work. You're essentially presenting consumers with potential points of engagement, and we plan to continue to make that a highlight of our social strategy. We're learning a lot on other social platforms as well - such as the Twitter Chat on South America that saw over 300 people respond and engage with us on Twitter.
If you can structure a promotion that taps into an inherent interest, [in addition] to a transactional opportunity at different places int he decision making process - those are the things that have validated our approach.
Of course, given the many layers between the OTA and other travel partners like airlines and DMOs, these sorts of partnership-driven campaigns take time to construct.
There are a lot of ideas, but because it's a partnership, we have to convince the partners first and thats a process. It's easier to point to these examples and try to engage a Hawaii in an opportunity like this, where you can see highlighting different aspects of the different islands, for example.
It's all about trying to find coherent themes with many different aspects and many different partners that drive that engagement.
As far as the partners are concerned, they seem ecstatic about the results reaped from the South America Week partnership.
Peru Tourism's Strategic Alliances Coordinator Alan Kupis Gianella:
The partnerships as the one we have with Expedia are critical for Promperú as they allow us to reach our objectives: increase the arrival of tourists to Perú, increase the stay expenditure during their trip, increase our market share in south America, getting travelers to Perú that on a first stage wanted to travel to a competitor country, to have more exposure on the markets we want to reach, offer packages with price to come to Perú.
In order to achieve these goals we request our allies to create new ideas. During 2013, Expedia [came up with] South America Week.
South America Week has provided to be an excellent tool for sales, the year to year hotel nights booking showed an 145% increment during this activity, this is an outstanding result.
Across campaigns last year, the ROI ratio we got thanks to the 52 alliances handled in 11 countries was over 17:1, and we expect to have a higher ROI this year thanks to actions as South America Week.
Peru Tourism also sees these sorts of partnerships as a key balance to the dominance of OTAs in travel.
The partnerships with recognized OTAs such as Expedia will become a key part of our program as the online sales is getting stronger in our daily life.
Every year the traditional tour operation is losing power against online travel agencies and we need to get on this trend and be pioneers implementing new ways to reach the customers. South America Week has proven to be an excellent tool and has confirmed that we chose the right actions with the right ally.
Expansive content-based, giveaway-sweetened promotions are a fantastic way to both leverage travel's magic and increase revenues across the board for all partners.